Ariel Center for
Policy Research

A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND THE ARTS

 

NATIV   ■   Volume Fifteen   ■   Number 4-5 (87-88)  ■  September 2002   ■  Ariel Center for Policy Research

 

SYNOPSIS

 


 

Islamic Judeophobia: An Existential Threat

Robert S. Wistrich

The Islamic terrorist perpetrators of the September massacres speak a language of hatred for America, the West, Israel and the Jewish people: their mental structures and world-views have striking analogies with Nazism. The attacks were greeted with rapture in many parts of the Muslim world, including in the Palestinian Authority. Muslim immigrants have carried these attitudes, exacerbated by media coverage of the Middle East conflict, to their Western hosts, resulting in an increase in anti-Semitic assaults on Diaspora Jewish communities (especially in Europe).

Blame for Israel has been ubiquitous throughout the Muslim world. In this context, the present intifada has made it plain that Palestinian, Arab/Muslim grievances against Israel cannot be satisfied by territorial and political concessions. The antagonism lies far deeper and goes well beyond the issue of “settlements”. It extends to the entire Jewish national project. A culture of hatred has arisen which has become an end in itself. This image of the Jewish state as the incarnation of malignant evil naturally encourages the idea that all the Jews of Israel should be wiped out.

One finds a growing readiness among Muslims to believe that the Jews consciously invented the “Auschwitz lie”, the “hoax” of their own extermination, as part of a plan for world domination. Holocaust denial gives Arabs a radical challenge to the moral foundations of the Israeli state, their scapegoat for their inability to achieve political unity, economic development and other goals.

In 2002, clearly very little has changed in the basic repertoire of Islamic Judeophobia, but it has become more widespread, intense, radicalized and militantly religious in character. Daniel Pearl was executed because to be born a Jew has become for many Islamic fascists, as it was for Hitler and the Nazis, an a priori reason to be executed.

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